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(above) Bright skies above INI's main entrance.
INI NEWS BULLETIN
November 2020
Dear friends, associates and supporters of INI,
Welcome to the November 2020 edition of our monthly news bulletin. Not long following our last message, it was announced that England would enter a second lockdown, this time for a month, during which all those able to work from home would be asked to do so. Our plans to continue reintroducing staff to the building were therefore temporarily put on hold.
However, we are pleased to say that our virtual activities and planning for future programmes continue apace. Organisers and participants of the "Infectious Dynamics of Pandemics" (IDP) programme are preparing academic papers based on their ongoing research, with a number of preprints already available on our website; work on updating and upgrading newton.ac.uk is continuing strongly; and during this rare fallow period for the main building the toilet facilities are being refurbished to ensure accessibility throughout.
Below you will find three podcasts recorded this month, which include: an interview with INI mainstay, former President of the Royal Statistical Society, and IDP organiser Professor Valerie Isham; an insightful discussion about the relationship between mathematics and art; and an examination of just how important funding for early career researchers (such as that recently provided by the Cambridge Philosophical Society) can be for fuelling collaborations throughout the science.
Thanks as always for your continued support.
- INI Communications team
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Contact: communications@newton.ac.uk
PODCAST OF THE MONTH #1: "27 years of progress"... an interview with Professor Valerie Isham
(above) Professor Valerie Isham.
In episode #28 Valerie Isham (University College London) joins Dan Aspel and Ciara Dangerfield to discuss her wide-ranging involvement with the Newton Institute from 1993 to the present day. Topics touched upon include developments within the science of modeling pandemics, the challenges and surprising benefits of remote working and virtual meetings, and the pervasive fascination of probability and statistics.
00:00 - Welcome
00:45 - Introductions
03:29 - An extensive history with INI
07:00 - Progress in the science across a 30-year period, computational power
11:20 - Organising the Infectious Dynamics of Pandemics programme
14:10 - The challenges and positives of virtual activities
23:00 - Augmented lifespans and flexibility in online programmes
29:40 - The informal “friendly environment” of home working and video calls
31:45 - How has our mathematical knowledge of pandemics moved on since the 1990s?
35:35 - First discovering a love of maths
48:26 - Being drawn to probability and statistics
40:05 - Recommendations: “Plagues and Peoples” by William McNeill, “The Gene: An Intimate History" by Siddhartha Mukherjee, “The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius” by Graham Farmelo.
PODCAST OF THE MONTH #2: "Art of INI" mini-series: what is the connection between mathematics and artwork?
Photo: Michael Dziedzic.
In this first of an "Art of INI" mini-series , host Dan Aspel is joined by INI staff Barry Phipps (Curator of Art and Science) and David Abrahams (Director) to discuss whether the worlds of mathematics and art share common ground. The Isaac Newton Institute hosts many sculptures, drawings, paintings, carvings and other artworks, as well as more than 2,500 visiting mathematicians per year. But where do these two worlds collide? Are mathematics and art aspiring to the same goals? What interactions exist between the two? Can
one inspire the other?
00:00 - Welcome
00:43 - Introductions
01:10 - INI and art: what’s the connection?
11:09 - The unconscious influence of art on mathematicians
13:34 - The similarities between art and maths
17:10 - Can maths ever have a “blank canvas”?
20:20 - Applying the thinking of one field to another
23:58 - Schools of maths, schools of art (“a hornet’s nest”)
27:32 - “Visualising” work
30:45 - The “Growth, form an self-organisation” programme
35:00 - Present artworks at INI
41:12 - … future artworks at INI
PODCAST OF THE MONTH #3: Cambridge Philosophical Society mini-series: an interview with Dr Francisco Sahli
(above) Dr Francisco Sahli.
In recent years, the generous support of the Cambridge Philosophical Society has allowed INI to further support the attendance of early career researchers in its programmes and workshops. This first of three interviews speaks to one such recipient: Dr Francisco Sahli. Francisco is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of computational cardiology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and attended the 2019 programme "The fickle heart". Dan Aspel and Ciara Dangerfield speak to him about his experience of the
Institute, the ensuing collaborations and the importance of funding for more junior members of the community.
00:00 - Welcome
00:55 - Introductions
01:50 - Attending “The Fickle Heart” programme, the mathematics of modelling the human heart
04:15 - Being an early career researcher at an INI workshop
07:45 - … and ensuing collaborations
08:30 - Favourite memories of time at INI
09:30 - The importance of funding: “Just the airplane ticket to go to Europe is pretty expensive from Chile”
11:58 - Future plans
